Predators lurking on social site?

Barrow County deputies recently arrested a Commerce man who was having lewd conversations on Facebook with a Barrow County sheriff's investigator posing as an underage girl.

But the accused child exploiter didn't meet his prey on Facebook. He connected with her in a chat room, and that's the real danger, experts say.

"From what we've have seen at the GBI, the majority of the cases that we make are based on some of the other chat rooms and not on something like Facebook," said John Whitaker, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who heads up Georgia's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. "This, as far as we've seen, is a fairly isolated incident. ... Most of them relate to other sites or places where people meet to chat."

Barrow County sheriff's deputies arrested Franklin Varner, of Commerce, earlier this month after a nine-month investigation in which a sheriff's investigator posed as an underage girl. Varner originally met the "girl" in an unnamed chat room, but they carried on some of their conversations on Facebook, according to investigators.

It's rare for sexual predators to first meet or approach young people on Facebook, because the site has so many ways to flag inappropriate messages and postings, and because it's the crowded streetcorner version of a virtual space, Whitaker said.

Often Facebook contacts are limited to people the user knows in real life, which limits the number of strangers who can strike up an inappropriate conversation with an underage user, he said.

"They do seem to make a big splash when one of those sites can be connected to a crime," he said. "In our work, we've seen that almost any chat room out there is more dangerous than those areas, and the others are not regulated and not moderated. ..."

The Barrow County Sheriff's Office began in the fall running online investigations in which sheriff's deputies pose as underage girls.

So far, they've made six arrests of men from Barrow, Jackson and Gwinnett counties and from Atlanta and the Savannah area, said Brian Brown, who runs Internet Crimes Against Children investigations for the sheriff's office.

They've seen a few cases where a predator will pick up an underage girl in a chat room and then continue the conversation on a moderated social networking site like Facebook or by email.

"The initial contact often starts in a chat room, but can quickly spread to email and other social networking sites, such as Facebook," Brown said. "We have reports of other predators using Facebook, as well.

"This is, however, just one of the many social networking services a predator may use. We do not think one social networking site is more of a threat than any other at this point," he said.

Although experts say chat rooms are where cyber predators are most likely to meet their prey, just because a child or teen stays away from those places doesn't mean the Internet is entirely safe, Whitaker said.

Peer-to-peer bullying and sexual harassment still are common problems on sites like Facebook, he said.

But that's not usually the focus of their investigations.

"It's something that we run into every now and then," Whitaker said. "We have been making suggestions ourselves that there should be a separate code section that addresses child-on-child crimes like sexting or harassment, that deals with those types of things that happen off of school grounds."

Parents paying attention to Internet use is the best way to prevent both child-on-child harassment and to guard against sexual predators taking advantage of underage Internet users, Brown said.